Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Enabling and controlling light shafts


In previous scenes we have already seen the use of Light Shafts (or God Rays) which disperse around objects occluding any light on which rays are enabled. The classic use for light shafts is as a feature of sunlight, but any light can have Light Shafts enabled in its properties, and this can be used to create a 'beams through fog' effect without really doing anything more than turn them on for a given light. There are a few properties worth exploring, to tune the look of light shafts when they're used.

  1. The given screenshot shows a sequence from an animated light casting light shafts around a 'sun' mesh, which is just an Emissive sphere. The example comes from our online bonus recipe (PDF), that supplements the book Creating an animated day to night transition and can be found at http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/1802EXP Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook_Bonus Recipes.PDF.

  2. For the current scene, which you may wish to do first...